The Children of Lir

I The Choosing of a King

When the sons of Míl had beaten the Tuatha Dé Danann at Tailtiu, the old gods of Ireland did not die. They went into the hills. They took the sí: the hollow mounds, the green raths, the long cairns under the grass. They live there still, the tellers say, behind doors that mortal eyes pass over.

Even so, a people must have a king. The Dé Danann gathered to choose one, and Lir of Síd Fionnachaidh was certain it would be him. It was not. They chose Bodb Dearg, son of the Dagda, and Lir went home without a word of homage and without a blessing on the choice.

The others would have followed him with fire and spear. Bodb Dearg would not allow it. Let him be, he said. Our friendship is worth more than his submission. ¹

He had his chance to prove it. Lir’s wife died, and a great grief came down on him, and Bodb sent word north. He had three foster-daughters, the daughters of Ailill of Aran: Aobh, Aoife and Ailbhe. Lir might choose among them. So Lir came south to Bodb’s hall above Loch Deirgdheirc, and the old quarrel was ended, and he chose the eldest. He chose Aobh. ²

II Aobh

Aobh bore him twins, a girl and a boy: Fionnuala and Aodh. Then she bore twins again, two boys, Fiachra and Conn, and in bearing them she died.

Lir would have died of grief himself, the tellers say, but for the four children. He kept them near him. He rose in the night to look at them sleeping. And Bodb Dearg, grieving too, sent him the second sister, Aoife, to be his wife and a mother to her sister’s children.

For a while it was well. The children were loved by everyone who saw them, at Lir’s house and at Bodb’s. Bodb Dearg himself came north often, only to be near them.

That was the trouble.

III The Wand at Loch Dairbhreach

Jealousy came on Aoife, cold and slow. She took to her bed and lay there for the better part of a year, sick with something no one could name. When she rose, she had a plan.

She yoked her chariot and set out with the four children to visit Bodb Dearg. Fionnuala did not want to go. She had dreamed of what was waiting on the road. But the children of a king’s house do as they are told.

On the way Aoife turned to her servants. Kill them, she said, and you may have anything you ask of me. They refused her. So she took up a sword to do it herself, and her own hand failed her.

They came to the shore of Loch Dairbhreach, and she sent the children down into the water to bathe. When all four were swimming, she struck them one by one with a wand of draíocht, and where four children had been, four white swans floated on the lake.

Fionnuala spoke. Her voice was still her own. This is an evil thing you have done, she said, and your punishment will be worse than ours. Tell us at least how long we must stay like this.

Aoife gave them their sentence. Three hundred years on Loch Dairbhreach. Three hundred on Sruth na Maoile, the cold sea between Ireland and Alba. Three hundred at Iorras Domhnann and Inis Gluaire on the western ocean. The spell would hold until a woman of the south was joined with a man of the north: until Lairgnéan of the north took Deoch of the south. The old telling adds more: until the Tailcenn comes to Ireland, and until you hear the voice of a Christian bell. ³

Then something moved in her, pity or fear. She left them what she could. They would keep their own speech, and their human reason. And they would sing: a music so sweet and so sad that anyone who heard it would fall asleep. ⁴

IV Music on the Lake

Aoife drove on to Bodb Dearg’s hall alone. Where are the children? he asked. Lir would not trust them to you, she said. Bodb did not believe her. He sent word north, and Lir came riding south in dread, and at the shore of Loch Dairbhreach he heard his children calling to him from the water.

When Bodb Dearg learned the truth, he asked Aoife what shape, on the earth or above it, she hated most. A demon of the air, she said. Then that is the shape you will take, said Bodb, and he struck her with his own wand. She went from them shrieking into the wind, and she is a demon of the air still, and will be until the end of time. ⁵

Then a strange thing happened. The Dé Danann came and camped on the shore to hear the swans sing. The sons of Míl came too, the new people of Ireland, and the old enemies sat side by side through the evenings and listened. Whoever heard that music slept sound and woke content, whatever grief they carried.

For three hundred years they came. When the swans rose at last from the lake, a law was made that no one in Ireland should kill a swan. ⁶

V Sruth na Maoile

The Sea of Moyle is the narrow water between the cliffs of Antrim and the Mull of Kintyre. It is cold and fast and full of rock. No one came there to hear anyone sing.

One night a storm broke over them and scattered the four across the dark water. Fionnuala had told her brothers where to meet if that ever happened: Carraig na Rón, the Rock of the Seals. She reached it alone and sang on it through the night, and at dawn her brothers found her, one by one, half-drowned and shaking.

She took all three in. Fiachra went under her right wing and Conn under her left, and Aodh against the feathers of her breast. ⁷

On the worst night of all, a night in January, the frost froze them to the rock. When they tore themselves free, they left the skin of their feet on it, and the quills of their wings, and the feathers of their breasts, and the salt sea stung in every wound. For three hundred years they lived on that water.

VI The Western Ocean

When their time on the Moyle was done, they flew west to Iorras Domhnann, where the land runs out in bog and stone and the whole grey Atlantic comes in against it.

The ocean was no kinder than the narrow sea. The spray froze on their feathers. Winters came when they could hardly lift their wings. For three hundred years the western ocean was their home, and the little island of Inis Gluaire their shelter.

Fionnuala kept them singing through all of it.

VII The Empty Hill

At last the nine hundred years were done. They flew east over the whole width of Ireland, to their father’s house at Síd Fionnachaidh.

It was not there.

Where Lir’s hall had stood they found a place deserted and solitary: ruined walls under rank grass and forests of nettles. No house, no fire, no hearth-smoke, no mark that anyone had ever lived there. Their father was gone. Their people were gone. The world they had left had quietly ended while they were out on the sea. ⁸

They stayed one night, keening. Then they flew back west to the only home they had left, the island of Inis Gluaire.

VIII The Bell

One morning, at early matins, they heard a sound they had never heard in all their years: thin and clear, carried over the water. A bell.

It was the bell of Mochaomhóg, a holy man who had come to live on the island. The brothers were afraid of it. Fionnuala was not. This is the voice we were promised, she told them. This is the end of our pain.

They came to him, and he knew who they were, and he cared for them. He had two chains of silver made: one to link Fionnuala and Aodh, one to link Fiachra and Conn. They sang with him, and they were glad.

In those days the king of Connacht was Lairgnéan, son of Colmán, and his queen was Deoch, daughter of Fingin, king of Munster: the man of the north and the woman of the south. Deoch had heard of the singing swans, and she would have them. Lairgnéan came to the island. Mochaomhóg refused him. The king seized the silver chains and dragged the swans from the altar,

and their feathers fell away.

Where the swans had been stood a withered old woman and three old men, white-haired and bony and wrinkled, nine hundred years old. Lairgnéan turned and left them.

Fionnuala asked Mochaomhóg to baptise them, for death was very near. And she asked one thing more. Bury us together, she said, standing, as I sheltered them on the sea: a brother at my right side, a brother at my left, and Aodh before my face. ⁹

He did as she asked. He raised a stone over the grave and cut their names on it in ogham.